Climb every san.

san = mountain

Two weekends ago my friend Shana and I took on a mountain, Dobongsan. Seoul is virtually surrounded by mountains, especially to the north. These aren't exactly the Rockies, but they are mountains; sheer face rock climbers included. They are all basically national parks, and you can usually get to the top of one in just a few hours.

Hiking is a "hobby" here. More than that...an obsession. Here was our day:

Wanting to get an early start, we had set a goal of reaching the mountain around 7:00 am. Reality and the snooze button had other plans, so 8:30 it was. Mount Dobong is on the northern edge of town and you can get fairly close to it via the subway, so we hit the station to wait for a train heading north. This was Sunday, so countless Koreans were out and about. We did notice that well over 90% of the people at the station and on our train had on hiking gear.

"Gear" is a funny thing here. Whatever you do, you need to have gear. For golfers, there is a part of town that has literally HUNDREDS of golf shops, some of which sell clubs but most sell golf clothes. Apparently, you've really got to "look the part" around here. Hiking is no different. You need to be wearing an $80 breathable lycra long sleeve shirt. You need matching pants. You need $130 hiking boots. You need fingerless gloves. You need a mesh cap with a tiny bill. You need a tundra-type backpack with god knows what inside. You need 2 aluminum walking poles with grippy bottoms. If you don't have the gear, you need to get with the program!

We were not with it. T-shirts. Jeans. 1 backpack between the 2 of us. Tennis shoes. Downright foolishness!!

Anywho....we get to the subway stop indicated from our directions. We make a move to get off, but NONE of the other hikers moved a muscle. Okay. We now have about 3.5 seconds to decide whether to continue with our own directions and jump through the door or follow the herd to wherever they might take us.

Now I know what lemmings feel like.

We followed the crowd out at the next exit, across the street, and down a side street toward the mountain in the distance. Keep in mind this is a crowd to be counted not by the tens, but by the hundreds. It was kind of surreal. We passed countless various stands and shops selling everything from cotton candy to Korean food of all sorts to the latest in North Face hiking supplies.

We winded through various back alleys and small streets up to the park gate and went on through. Shortly thereafter, we found a sign with a map and plotted our course. The paths are very well laid-out and well organized. The bathrooms at "base camp" were clean and modern. (i'll tell you about the "un-modern" bathrooms later) The weather was perfect; sunny with a cool breeze. The leaves here are changing as we speak, so it made for a beautiful morning and an amazing start to the day.

You don't need a play by play of the hike. I'll add some pictures that can speak much more eloquently than I can. I will say this though:

It was about the weirdest "nature" adventure that I've ever had. Don't get me wrong. It was beautiful. The strange part was the people, the throngs of people everywhere you look. If you hold your arms out in any direction you will probably poke someone. If you walk too fast you will probably have to pause as the people ahead of you slow up.

As if the mountain itself wasn't beautiful enough, along the way there were large and small Buddhist temples tucked into the rock. I have no clue how they were built there, but there they were, almost magical, secluded havens. They had beautiful, colorful rooofwork and statues of various sizes. I'm not Buddhist, but you definitely don't have to be to appreciate these temples. They were here long before the railed pathways and the cotton candy stand.

After a lot of climbing(and a little sitting) we reached the peak. Two peaks actually. The view was amazing, overlooking the city to the south and the countryside everywhere else. Now, there were paths and rails to help climb along the way, but the peak itself was just that, a peak. Considering how many people flooded this area, I'm surprised that we didn't see anyone fall to their death. It was a crowded rock and a looong drop.

We perched ourselves on a "somewhat" safe ledge away from the crowded path and ate our lunch. Shana had Kimbap, kind of like sushi rolls without the meat. I had a hot dog on a stick, the most common way to eat hot dogs here apparently. We split our "reward" for completing our mission, an Oreo cookie wafer, and relaxed for a bit.

You know.......memories are strange. We all have certain memories that last forever, certain moments that are etched into the inside of our skulls. As I'm sitting here thinking, I'm realizing that most of those memories for me involve rocks strangely enough. I remember sitting on a huge, weather worn boulder reading a Jon Varley book, overlooking Lake Superior as the grey, choppy waves sprayed cold mist into the air. I remember scaling a cliffed area in South Dakota on a trip for Mr. Frutiger's Advanced Biology class. My friend Heath was always the daredevil growing up, but this time I was the one who dared to stretch and straddle over a huge drop from one secure rock to the next to make it to the top. I remember skipping stones in Pelican Lake, spending hours searching for the perfectly weighted, perfectly sized, perfectly gripable rock. I remember the beach at the Palisades north of Duluth, with it's millions of rocks that were made pristinely round and smooth by centuries of violent waves. The view from this beach was breathtaking, but the stones still stole the show.

I'll remember this day too I think, that lunch on the rocky ledge, wedging my foot against the trunk of a small tree for safety and comfort, eating a cold hot dog. I'll remember waving to the true mountain climber on the "real" peak up above. He waved back as he sat, eating his own lunch, enjoying his better view.

I miss you guys and I hope that at least one or two of you can come and share this with me for a short while. Take care, and I'll be thinking of ya!

~tony